Sunday, February 11, 2018

actor-activist (and definitely not a conservative) Tim Robbins, The New York Times, February 3:
"People losing their careers based on innuendo or accusation is troubling for me. There is a process for this: a legal system. Convicting someone on an accusation is really dangerous territory to be living in."President Donald Trump, Twitter, February 10:
"Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?"

Saturday, August 5, 2017

Because he wanted to be just like Late Night With David Letterman regular Larry "Bud" Melman.

"He mentioned he always saw Larry [walk on] with those gorgeous models," Letterman's longtime bandleader, Paul Shaffer, told Chicago Sun-Times reporter Dave Hoekstra in November 2009 while promoting his memoir, We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives, cowritten with David Ritz. "Dylan said, 'Why is he with those chicks?'"

Two decades after first appearing on NBC's Late Night—Dylan also performed on the penultimate episode of Letterman's next venture, CBS's Late Show, in May 2015—the singer-songwriter was given the chance to emulate his hero. Well, almost—Adriana Lima is the only model, gorgeous or otherwise, who shows up in Dylan's ad for Victoria's Secret.

There are legends, and then there are legends. Advantage: Larry "Bud" Melman.

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

A total of 666 IMDb users have given The Little Hours, an American comedy about naughty nuns in 14th-century Italy, an average rating of 6.6 (out of 10) as of 5:20 AM today, July 18, 2017. And because those nuns are naughty, the movie's critic-based Metascore of 69 is simply divine.

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

"What's particularly striking in the new book, though, is the cluelessness of the stalwart Republican grandees of the Ford presidential campaign, who were both blindsided and baffled by Reagan's guerrilla victories in their own midst. A panicked internal Ford camp memo struggles to parse the 'unexpected Reagan success in certain caucus states,' where the voters who turned out in shockingly large numbers were 'unknown and have not been involved in the Republican political system before' and were 'alienated from both parties.' As if describing an Indian ambush in the Old West, the memo goes on to exclaim that 'we are in real danger of being out-organized by a small number of highly motivated right-wing nuts.' Among those shocked was the canny Texas political operator James Baker, the George H. W. Bush paladin, who couldn't get over how 'absolutely ruthless' these uppity Reagan shock troops were. 'Our people just aren't used to this uncompromising hardball stuff,' he told Time."

—from Frank Rich's review of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan by Rick Perlstein, The New York Times Book Review, August 3, 2014

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

It was bound to happen: clickbait writers, stressed out by the sheer volume of headlines they're forced to crank out on a daily basis, began drinking at work, leading to head-scratchers like the one below.